Becoming more emotional

I want to be more emotional. I think the word ‘emotional’ has been overused to mean a negative attitude. Most of the time, whenever someone says “you’re emotional”, I think they meant being (recklessly) emotional. I’m not talking about that.

I’m talking about being in the state of knowing the specifics of an emotion. Why? Because if we know more about emotions, we can be more emotionally intelligent.

There’s a reason why a professional fashion stylist is paid to mix and match clothes. When we go to Clark’s, we see shoes. But a fashion stylist sees brogues, oxfords, chukkas, loafers, and moccasins. The different types of shoes mean they are suitable to be paired with different kinds of trousers.

In the vast classification of emotions, there are more than just happy and sad. The more emotions we know, the better we ascertain one emotion amongst the others. This is called the emotional granularity.

The same way you wouldn’t hire a person who thinks brogues and moccasins are just shoes as your stylist, a person who thinks most positive emotions are just happiness and most negative emotions are just sadness wouldn’t be so emotionally intelligent.

Why? Because the point of knowing the specifics of an emotion is so that we do something about it. The same way if you caught a flu, you take clarinase. If you’re having a fever, you take ibuprofen. If we think all diseases are just ‘sickness’, it’s not easy to get the right cure.

That’s why an emotionally unintelligent person might resort to a different kind of solution like overeating or overdrinking to cure their ‘negative feelings’. One must know what they specifically feel.

I know what you think. Learning all the accurate terms of emotions sounds super tedious. Although that’s more preferred, there’s a cheat sheet around that, perfectly illustrated by Lisa Feldman Barrett in her book How Emotions Are Made;

Name those emotions.

Whenever you feel an emotion, try to think deeply the details of your feelings. You might feel sad, but sad how? Sad why? There are several ways to do this, but like the method of loci (a technique to memorise), I prefer the one that’s highly personalised to ourselves.

Heck, give it a name that goes with your vibe. I’ll share some example that I’ve come out with;

1. Lusinco (short for lustful inconsistency): the emotion when I want to do something that’s good for the short term but it’s eventually bad for the long term. Eg: I want to have a fit body, but I feel the desire to eat unhealthy food.
2. Afla (short for affected laziness): the emotion whenever I feel lazy to do something that’s previously wasn’t hard for me. Eg: I always wash the dishes. One day I decided to skip doing it. Eventually, I became lazy to do it.

As you can see, most of the named emotions that I did were the negative ones. The rationale of this is to acknowledge its existence and to avoid it. That’s why if a person wants to debate effectively, they must study the fallacies in arguments. Not to judge others, but primarily to be constantly aware of fallacies so that they can avoid them in arguments.

The more you know that you can be bad, the more probable that you can be better.

For example, whenever I feel lazy to do laundry, I will internally scream “afla!” to remind myself that I used to do this easily without any reluctance. Of course, I can forget about emotional granularity and just label that as laziness.

But I would miss the point of realising that the laziness wasn’t habitual and give excuses like “I was born like this”. It’s also useful to prevent myself from skipping good habits, so I don’t have more aflas in the future.

Moreover, the reason it’s good to personally name the emotions is so that we will remember the story behind it. For example, in psychology, lusinco is very closely related to hyperbolic discounting.

However, I personally think that hyperbolic discounting is a term to describe the tendencies of human behavior instead of having a personal origin to ourselves.

But the point of this personal naming scheme is not to give a psychological lecture. Rather, it’s aligned with the goal of becoming more emotionally intelligent. Whenever I whisper lusinco to myself, it’s to remind my current emotion is temporary. The emotion is controllable.

It is undeniable that if we want to be more socially useful, it’s good to learn the accurate taxonomy under the emotional granulity so we don’t say things like “you cannot be gehamura” or “I feel so yutana” to our friends.

To be emotionally intelligent is the goal. Wherever we can practically start, we’ll start from there. What’s important is we stay gradisc to ourselves. What’s that? Who knows 😉